Tag: Ask Jake

If you who have ever tried to install Amazon Unbox Video on your Vista laptops, you will know about the troublesome installation process that often shows an error message of the type:

Error: -1603 Fatal error during installation.

Consult Windows Installer Help (Msi.chm) or MSDN for more information

This error has nothing to do with any snag in your Vista PC – rather it is due to the fact that the programmers at Amazon wrote a sloppy code while making the Unbox Video player. However, you can surmount this problem with the following workaround. [It is a little bit involved, but it gets the work done alright.]

Open an elevated command prompt that has administrator privileges. You can do this by signing in with an administrator account, and then entering cmd in the Start field and pressing Enter.

At the prompt, enter the following two lines, (press enter after each line),cd c:\windows\system32regsvr32 vbscript.dll

After you enter the second command, you will get an error message but do not worry. This ‘error message is precisely what is desired in this workaround. The message will say something to the effect of:The module “vbscript.dll” was loaded but the call to DllRegisterServer failed with error code 0x80004005.

For more information about this problem, search online using the error code as a search term.

After you get the above message, press OK.

Exit the command prompt.

Now, you should uninstall/remove any traces of the Amazon Unbox Video service from your PC and try installing the program from scratch. This time around, your installation should go through perfectly without any hitches. The error arises because the installation could not connect to the registration server properly, and you forced the registration of the DLL with the workaround – and hence it worked after that.